The Pebble and the Moto F3 are both on borrowed time. The Pebble is no longer getting updates and the servers on which it depends are on borrowed time in the wake of the acquisition by FitBit. Meanwhile, 2G cellular networks are getting re-farmed and GSM phones which have been viable for years are finally being pulled off the grid. In fact, another treasured piece of tech – the iPhone I was issued gratis as an Apple employee in 2007 – will no longer work on AT&T’s network as of January 1, because they’ve already pulled the plug on the 2G network.
I brought this up some time ago. On the one hand, I got the MOTOFONE F3 as a Christmas present in 2007, and even then, it was already a sort of coelacanth – a phone in 2007 with a 7-segment display that could send and receive calls (with speakerphone even!), send and receive text messages (without even upper case or a full set of punctuation marks), store 10 speed-dial numbers on the SIM, set an alarm (to ring at the same time every 24 hours or not at all) and show the time of day on the front. It was already 10 years behind state of the art. And yet, those 10 year old phones – in theory – would still have worked just as well. Had I bought a Powertel or Sprint Spectrum GSM phone in 1997 as I’d desired, then in 2007, assuming they were not SIM-locked and I could find the appropriate SIM form-factor, I could continue to use them to place calls and maybe even set an alarm. It’s not much, but there you go.
But that required a compatible network. And just like AMPS and TDMA before it, the original flavor 2G GSM network – which started as Pac Bell or PowerTel or Sprint Spectrum or Voicestream and eventually ultimately all became either AT&T or T-Mobile – is now being refarmed in the desperate search for enough bandwidth to accommodate the Snapchat generation. Which means that any phone from before the initial re-push of 3G in 2007 is about to be a paperweight.
(Sidenote: I remember the old uppercase AT&T’s abortive effort at pushing out UTMS in 2004. Then they got eaten by Cingular and 3G disappeared for a couple of years, only to emerge just as the initial iPhone didn’t offer it. Which in turn led T-Mobile to brand their faster non-LTE 3G as “4G” and add to the confusion that drives us all insane today. God help us once 5G starts rolling out.)
But that’s obsoleting a bunch of phones from the pre-Obama era. For the Pebble to have the rug yanked from beneath it is a little more alarming. The first Pebble watch, fresh from the greatest crowdfunding success ever, arrived in January 2013 and was pronounced dead just under four years later. I bought one in 2015, and had replaced it with an Apple Watch within four months because if I needed a smartwatch, I needed a smarter one – but the Pebble was still useful in its way, and would have made a nice companion to the Moto X, similarly on its last legs (without a security update since last April and without an OS update since Lollipop 5.1).
As Aldrich Killian said in Iron Man 3, “the early bird may get the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.” Pebble turned out to be the first mouse. And as networks evolve, it’s anyone’s guess how long something like my Moto X will continue to be viable – but I’m prepared to bet I won’t be noting that it’s just now being cut out of usability in 2024. Software makes our smart devices less like phones and more like laptops. With predictable results.